The Brothers Bang

There have been moments when I've hated my bro, but for every such moment, there've been at least a dozen to be thankful for having him around.

Can't imagine being a single child. I think being in pairs is a leg up. You start out knowing that whatever happens out there, you have someone who has your back. It's also a catbird's seat in the sense that you learn to interact and deal with people your age which no adult can possibly provide however great they are with kids, and this kind of social intelligence acquired at home serves well in future which I think a lot of single kids have to learn the hard way.

There's a single moment in the 50,000 odd hours we spend as grad students when we start realizing what we want to do with our lives once the graduation is over. That's an important one as that's when you start to grapple with what you want to do, what you can do, and how good you are gonna be when you are on your own. In fact, that's one of the defining moments in our lives as our roads diverge at that point. Some people want hardcore research, some want to go into academics, some want to steer clear of either and go into something less demanding, and some just wanna earn money. Boundaries arising from that moment which go on to define us for a long time, probably for ever.

I love my profession. I am good at it. I've reached my own defining moment long back. I know what I want. Usually, that is and should be enough. And right now, it is not. I want someone else to share this belief. When you are embarking on your own, you want someone to put money on your horse to make it race.

Stringing Along Again...

I played violin after almost a year. It was screechy and underwhelming, but I went on (till even the melodious memories of the past shrivelled). And I am gonna continue doing so. I'll be damned if I let 3 years of violin classes go waste. I'm not giving up. Eventually, the creases will smoothen out and I'll manage something bearable.

PS. The only drawback is chicks dig guitar not violin...which I should have thought long back!

PPS. All you guitarists and your fans out there, violin is much tougher to master...Oh yeah, ain't I bitter:D

Ease in the Crease...

Easy was never the job description. I think they deliberately make it tough on us. So that only those who really want it, survive. Strive, reach out and grab it, or get filtered out. Dear god (Ricky Gervais, you rock!), let met bear and endure...

Conclusions? Research: cutthroat, brutal, but still sexy...

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

- William Ernest Henley

Fireflies in the Garden

Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size,
(And they were never really stars at heart)
Achieve at times a very star-like start.
Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.

- Robert Frost

The Summer Showers

...सुनके मतवाले काले बादलों का शोर,
रूम झूम घूम घूम नाचे मन का मोर...

...रिमझिम के तराने लेके आई बरसात,
याद आये किसी से वो पहली मुलाक़ात...

--------------------------------------------

Feel at the top of the game again! Boss showed an unequivocal interest which was a much needed boost. Today was a day of ideas! Experimental designs, models, experiments done in the past, what can one learn from them, the ideas buzzing in the head for years that never materialized, can one do them now, so on and so forth.

It felt so awesome just to lay back and soak myself in this intense, almost passionate pool of thoughts and ideas. I started here 5 years back, absolutely dreading the Saturday lab meets. The challenge to think beyond one's capacities, to redefine the boundaries which are mostly set by our own selves was a difficult and daunting task. I used to feel worse than a toddler learning to take first steps. It soon changed to boredom and that phase where disinterest creeps in coz you are looking at things singly and not looking at the bigger picture. Over time, especially after I started my own work, changed into interest that came with knowledge. Why things are the way they are, the history behind things you are doing and the possible future course you are laying for your successors. Finally, today, Saturday lab meets are one of those few things I'm desperately waiting for throughout the week. It's an intellectual getaway. Throughout the banal existence of the week when I'm mostly doing things I’m supposed to do, on Saturdays I feel like a free bird, soaring in the sky, or diving toward the earth whichever the case maybe, but free. That itself feels like at the top of the world. This is why I do what I do...Research...It makes my heart race. If I come up with something good, it makes worth the whole week’s dawg work, I feel euphoric...Even if someone else comes up with something great, it feel great, coz there’s a feeling that it has come from the home ground, someone who belongs to the same place as you. To think is the mantra in any case. I love to think, and research gives me that opportunity. The best part is (which has come through training one’s mind very hard), one doesn’t even do it consciously. I’m so bloody happppy to be in the middle of all this. The effort to create some meaning out of unknowns, to give way to light and to banish the darkness, to see and think about patterns that never seemingly existed, and then prove that indeed they were there just shrouded by the veils of obscurity. It gives me a high.

What Goes Up...

The last few weeks, I've been on an utter high (as may have been evident from my blog posts in case you didn't see me hopping around with mad joy). It had to end sometime. Grandpa G passed away this morning. Some more time is all everyone asked. Hopefully he didn't suffer. Right now, I want to do anything but to go and be with the family. Reminds me too much of earlier deaths in the family. But it's time to grow up and keep oneself in the background. I just wish S, S, V, M everyone gets the strength to cope up with this and be able to remember the long, active, productive life he led till now.

I will miss you KG.

October is the new March...

How can I say it without sounding self-congratulatory? Anyway, one more first...Got my first paper accepted in an international journal...things have been really happening this October...Those of you who will be interested already know where to look for it...I guess it'll be out in few months...A nice way to start 2010!

For what it's worth, I was selected in the interview.

I am nowhere nearer to clinching this extension, yet it feels so amazing. Actually, I don’t even care whether I get selected. I feel so great right now. This comes out of doing something properly and your efforts being appreciated.

I was nervous, coz I hadn’t appeared for an interview in three years, and that can make you out of practice. The best strategy I thought was to be myself and not pretend to be someone else, coz that starts consuming so much of your brain. Warts and all, take it or leave it. Moreover, the bigger problem is the attitude which keeps yelling in the background, do better you asshole! End result is even when you have given your best, you never feel satisfied with anything that you do. Now, it might be a good strategy to go forward in life and be your biggest damned critic, but in stressful conditions, when you need to feel good about yourself, that attitude doesn’t really help. So be yourself and be more kind to yourself were the only two things I kept reminding myself.

It went well, but the great moment was when one of the interviewers said in the end that how amazed he was at how much I have done, what I have done and my presentation skills. Now, this fellow was the one who I was most stressed about coz he is an amazing scientist and always comes up with questions least expected. Plus, in my first year here, I had taken his course, and he was so so great…so I didn’t want to measure any less in front of him. Add to that, presence of my advisor in the same room, and the pressure to perform in front of him. With all this, when this guy said that about my presentation, I realized how important all this was for me. Their realizing that I have worked my ass off for 4 years, and this is just a small part of all that. And if they find this much a lot, then the thesis will more or less fare well when presented in its entirety.

The best part of the interview was when boss said that just give them an idea about the other projects you are simultaneously working on. I was not prepared about it and that made it kinda exciting. I had no supplementary thing to support my talk, so decided to use board and give them an idea about various projects I have been running simultaneously with the one that I presented and how they relate with each other in answering the bigger question on the table. Don’t really know what they thought, but the most important thing was I felt exhilarated. There was no preparation for this part of the talk and so everything was impromptu. And I think I did a good job coz they seemed really focussed on what I was saying and giving all the right reactions, nod when they need to nod, smile when need to smile. So everything was great.

After all this, it might not be such a boring idea to teach. I always felt teaching is a big bore, and that’s because I always thought it’s so predictable. Year after year you teach more or less the same things, your punchlines are the same, your jokes are the same, your conclusions are the same, where’s the bloody excitement? But maybe it’s up to me to make it interesting for myself…Let’s see.

This is a mistake...

The Nobel Peace goes to Obama!

According to Alfred Nobel's will, Peace Nobel should go to the person "who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies and the formation and spreading of peace congresses.''

Nobel committee is ridiculing these words, right? Have they forgotten Obama's decision of sending 15,000+ American soldiers to Afghanistan "to stabilize the deteriorating conditions". A rhetoric if I knew any. Isn't this the lingo in which neo-rulers speak?

I am disappointed, disillusioned and my worst beliefs are turning into reality. Obama is turned into a demi-god by people who are confused and don't know where to go and whom to turn to. Obama is a saviour for them.

Ohhh, what a shame. I can't see his name (and deeds) in the same league as Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, Desmond Tutu, Aung San Suu Kyi, just to name a few luminaries who have been felicitated with this prize in the recent past.

I envy R and R (can you guess who they are??!!! R1, I don't want him to ever come to my blog coz he will 100 per cent throw a fit reading some of the stuff here...R2, now she is a different ballgame...she is a regular buyer of my shitty monologues and keeps coming to this blog like an ant to a fungus). These are two people I know who sleep even less than me (ha ha ha)! Now in case you are wondering why (I know, I know, there's absolutely nothing else to envy about them), I am the kind of person who thinks sleeping is a waste of time.

So, are you smirking already? That probably goes on to show that either you love your quota of sleep and find my reasoning ridiculous or you know me too well to believe what I said in the previous line. But who said thoughts and deeds are one and the same? Wanting to achieve something and actually being capable of achieving are two different things. I learnt it long back. I loathe sleeping. It's just that I can't help falling asleep. For the logically/verbally challenged, who still haven't got hold of my uber-cool logic on why I loathe sleeping, I will spell it out for you in numbers...1/3 rd of your life, you've spent sleeping...Look, for me, that's a big deal...I mean 9 years of my life...Do you realize what it means?

1. With my average, I could have had 9 more girlfriends.

2. I could have done 2 more PhDs (ok, this actually sounds scary, but you get the point, right?!)


So, the problem is that I sleep after a gap of every 14-15 hours even when I hate it coz I just can't seem to keep awake. My brain starts giving up. I can actually hear the knobs and switches in my brain getting turned off, I can actually see the lights being turned off and I can sense the buzzing and whirring of my neurons slowly coming to a standstill. Things start running in slow motion and I slip in the whirlpool of darkness.

This creates a dichotomy. My circadian rhythm is screwed up as the hatred pushes me to postpone sleep as long as I can, wondering in awe every single day whether I can skip sleep. Of course that doesn't happen being the sloth that I am, and eventually I do fall asleep, but then it's so late that when I finally get up again, half the day is already over. It's a nightmare (no pun intended).

Anyway, so that is the reason why I envy people who can do with much less sleep than me as they get more time living.

ps. I just can't believe I have spent half an hour of my time on writing a post on sleep!!!

Something happened in Dharwad. One of those insignificant details which make you smile when you think about them later on.

I met this girl. A sweet girl. One who gave me a lot of attention! Haven't got that in a while now. It made me feel years younger...Like when I was in PU or even before that during Bachelor's...

That raw awkwardness when you meet someone new...

What's absolutely great is that for those 2-3 days, I realized I have a heart too...which I'd given up on...so much so that I'd probably forgotten about its existence...and though I know nothing's gonna come out of this, I realized how my heart can thaw and revive at the slightest degree of attention from a female! I feel alive!

To paraphrase G. H. Hardy,

"There is no permanent place in the world for ugly science ... . It may be very hard to define beauty in science but that is just as true of beauty of any kind, we may not know quite what we mean by a beautiful poem, but that does not prevent us from recognising one when we read it."

So, these days I'm searching for a brain wave which will probably hit the right spot in my brain and help me come up with an appropriate title for my thesis. Something snazzy, cool and one which summarizes everything that I have been working toward...

We all have to finalize on our thesis titles by the end of the second year but no one really sticks to it as PhD is all about flexibility, checking out preferences and practicalities in the given arena of work. So the titles are quite dynamic.

Of course, I have seen people slogging, with only the faintest idea as to what is that one (or a few!) questions they would like to answer. Just work, gather data, and something will definitely emerge. This is their motto. It's ridiculous and pathetic. You know what that reminds me of? A supervisor writing a recommendation letter for one of his students, not knowing for whom he is writing and yet scribbling frantically on his notepad, and at the end of it, depending on how it has turned out, deciding which student he will give that letter to.

ps. Okkk. That was a distant simile. What to do? Everything these days reminds me of reco letters. Forget about my vices and virtues, I just hope my boss remembers who I am. He asked me few days ago whether I am done with my colloquium already!!!

Huhhhhhh??!!!

I'm glad I chose ecology. Can't think of doing anything else. This is what I know the best, and this is what I love doing...research...logic...thinking...aaahh...nothing can beat it.

The Panther

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tense, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Sometime

...from now, I will die. May be it's months or years from now. Or maybe I'll be conked off the next moment. With an impending situation like that, I want to make sure my life matters. Not just by having fun and proclaiming that I have lived and done everything there was to do. I want more than just that. I want something to be different in this world because of me.